heather van valkenburg professional bike racer palmares

In the case of this particular redoubt (to coin its literal English translation), the Austrian army had dug in to defend their land in the face of marauding French revolutionary forces. The top of this otherwise anonymous hill was once marked by fortifications and ditches. The term refers to a makeshift construction a temporary defensive build. The simple word ‘redoute’ is an arcane thing, overladen with military, historical meaning. It surely figured in his thinking every day – literally, metaphorically, actually – as he pedalled out of town. There is no better name for a climb than this the Côte de la Redoute must have loomed large over one young rider as he took the roads he watched his heroes race on. No one knows this climb better than Gilbert, the winner of La Doyenne in 2011. It’s only a short climb, but it punches up to 20 per cent in places enough to sink challenges and launch others. It was for many years the defining test of Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the oldest and most venerable of cycling’s five Monuments. The first climb that you will hit, if you choose the path to the east, after exactly one kilometre, is the Côte de la Redoute. Remouchamps is that fork in the road and presented Philippe Gilbert with two possible futures. Or you can turn right, into the French-speaking borderlands, hard up against Germany, where the roads start to rise and fall without relenting, picking their paths through damp and dense forests. You can either turn your bike into a headwind and vaguely towards Liège, beyond which lies Limburg and then Flanders, with its spit and sawdust language, its flatness and its characteristic hurt. There are two routes out of the small town of Remouchamps, where Philippe Gilbert grew up. If ever a landscape fashioned a rider, it was this one. Because if you pass there, it is finished. “It’s the last part of Belgium which is flat.

Heather van valkenburg professional bike racer palmares